Close to deadline...

First an update...

The past two months have been hard work trying to finish my latest project on wildlife and conservation in India. It has been a lot of late nights working hard at the computer and now I am finally near deadline. But will this mean some much needed vacation? No, not for now - This summer has turned out to become very busy indeed...

Greenland and Finland
Unfortunatlythe deadline of my India project mean that I had to cancel a trip to Iceland but shortly after my deadline i will be going to Greenland. I have'nt been to Greenland since march last year and i thorougly miss it. I am still working on my Arctic Fox Project and I have decided to visit a spot in Greenland which I know is rich in foxes. 
This place is way out of reach of the cellular network and i will spend 7 days there alone in a tent with my camera, coocking gear and a sattelite phone to keep in touch with my family.
Hopefully the foxes will be collaborative and the weather will be good. I will have good light almost 24 hours a day so I foresee quite a lot of working hours and very little sleep. But just photographing in Greenalnd again will feel like a vacation after all.

After that I will be going back home to celebrate the birthday of my oldest daughter and then it is off to Finland where I will be leading a tourgroup to see the wild brown bears near the Russian border. Here we will be spending 5 nights in hides looking for these cuddly brown teddies.

So July looks to be all set and after spending almost two months in front of the computer I really look forward to getting some time back in the wild.

I will be posting some more articles to this blog as soon as I have news from the trips and some photos to show.

I wish you all the very best summer.

Sleepless in India

Wauv, it has been a busy and relaxing month all at the same time. Sorry for the waiting time.

First up was India, what a nice trip that was. I flew to Delhi with Finnair who has now got a new and updated entertainment system. I managed to see 3 films on the 7-hour flight from Helsinki and didn’t get any sleep as I figured I could sleep in the train. From Delhi airport I arrived at the train station only to find out that I still had a 6-hour wait until departure. Really tired I went to a coffeshop to get some caffeine and although I did notice that the waiters were eying me quite a few times I didn’t notice the time. 4 hours later I left the coffeshop having only bought one cup of chai. Sorry...
As luck would have it, I found my compartment in the train only to realize that I had gotten a lower berth. This meant that I could not go to sleep before everybody decided it was time to settle. And let me put it this way; In India you don’t eat your food a 6-o´clock. When I finally went to sleep at about 11- o’clock in the evening, after staying awake fore just 34 hours I was so tired that I couldn’t even remember what I was doing in India.

Well the rest of the trip was perfect and I am spending most of my time right now sorting the images. For those of you who are wondering about my luck with the tigers, I can say that I had one really great sighting with really beautiful colours. But I was amazed at how much Bandhavgarh has changed since my last visit. The number of chital or spotted deer had really gone down and so had the number of tiger sightings in the park. Most of the park has been fenced to protect the tigers but in fact this is creating great difficulties for the tigers to distribute themselves. But I will get back to this in my next entry, where, hopefully I will have some more images ready to show.

After India I went straight to Italy on a holiday with my wife and daughters. Again no Internet, just like in India and therefore no chance to update the blog. Living without Internet connection for a month can be stressing at first. But after a while you get use to it and then you can really relax.

Before I end this entry I would like to express my gratitude to Kay and Satyendra at Skays Camp http://skayscamp.com/ for their kind hospitality and for all the great and interesting talks we had during my stay. If you are planning to visit Bandhavgarh you wont go wrong with these guys. True naturalists and conservationists they certainly know what they are doing and I recommend them from the bottom of my heart.